"Architecture
is the public art that shows people what they've been thinking."

Photographer: Torkel Korling Goldberg with "Unishelter"
1952

Bauhaus

After Bertrand
Goldberg left his native Chicago in 1932 to study architecture at
the Bauhaus, his every inclination was to design within the language
of Mies van der Rohe. Within the theory of Mies, he sought to achieve
a democracy of architectural forms which could solve the problems
of the greatest number of people and their widest possible needs.

At the same
time, Goldberg considered it a mistake for New York's new Museum of
Modern Art to anoint Bauhaus design concepts as the "International
Style." By seeing modernism as interpreted by the European minimalists
only as a "style," was to miss their point entirely. The
Bauhaus wedded architecture to industrialization in order to solve
the social problems of modern man as a Utopian solution.

Plywood chair
Prototype for San Francisco Fair
1937

Chicago

Soon after his
return in 1934, he graduated from Chicago's Armour Institute, the
forerunner if IIT. Chicago during that time of its world's fair was
boiling with many competing design languages, one of which was the
conceptualism of Buckminster Fuller, the reigning deity of industrial
aesthetics. After working with Leland Atwood in the office of George
Fred Keck, Goldberg started his own practice in 1937. In 1938, he
designed transportable, factory produced housing and commercial structures
that could be assembled in a short time with easily fabricated components.

1930s

Two projects
in that year illuminate his approach to industrialized architecture.
The Clark/Maple service station in Chicago used two centralized masts
holding cable supported walls and roof that had been manufactured
off site. Unstable soil conditions allowed for only the masts to have
footings and foundations. The North Pole Ice Cream store was designed
to have a single mast from which were hung the window walls and roof.
The seasonal market conditions dictated that the stores could be erected
in the summer in Northern climates and in the winter in Southern ones.
Though only one North Pole store was constructed in River Forest that
summer, the philosophy of prefabrication influenced Goldberg for the
rest of his life.

The first houses
he designed were further experiments in prefabrication utilizing stressed
plywood for thinner interior and exterior walls. In his designs for
furniture, he also shaped plywood into body contoured surfaces for
a settee and chair he exhibited at the 1937 San Francisco Exposition.
A 1939 house he built combined a residence and physician's office
built entirely with the Chicago common brick used in connective party
walls of thousands of row houses. Finding modernist beauty in the
ubiquitous brown brick, Goldberg proved his kinship with the Chicago
School of Architecture.

The war years
found him looking for design solutions in partnership with the US
government. Because of his familiarity with prefabricated plywood
forms, the wartime restrictions on the use of metal made him the ideal
candidate to design mobile labs for penicillin production, desert
fumigation units and quickly assembled housing modules. Those same
talents, after the war, saw him transform the technologies into refrigerated
railroad cars and the "Unishelter," a factory built modular
housing system that could be packed as a shipping container before
its shipment to Alaska.

Though he shared
with other modernists a Utopian streak, envisioning ideal solutions
for "the people," he could never quite forget that he was,
at heart, a humanist, more concerned with "a person." By
1955, he was becoming disillusioned with what he felt were the deficiencies
of Miesian modernism. By then accepted as symbolic of corporate power
and wealth, the clean, internationalized forms were becoming artistic
end results in themselves and not flexible enough to respond to an
individual's needs.

"In
1955, I received this terrible shock when I realized that Mies was
not a man of his time. That what we called modern architecture was
an architecture that could be repeated for miles without beginning
or end."

Society had
changed after the turn of the 20th Century. Science, economics, technology
and even psychology had evolved with the growing scale of western
civilization. "By the end of World War I,..." Goldberg
wrote in his cynical 1982 essay "Rich is right""...the
box was recognized as the perfect shape to package a right-angled
society. The design of the perfect box kept pace with the mechanization
of all types of production: with factory made clothes, with steel
rolling mills, with automobiles, radios and packaged foods.

"The
individual disappeared, becoming part of masses measured and counted.
Governments and corporations lost their individuality as they were
taken over by managers who replaced an elite group of aristocrats;
these new forms of business and nations depended upon mass electorates,
mass markets and mass labor forces."

Goldberg felt
that the purpose of a city was for interpersonal interaction. "People
need to communicate personally with each other. This is a primitive
instinct which architecture must understand...for communication makes
community." Economy became the other driving force in his
approach to architecture. He had long felt that the 19th Century reinforced
concrete works of Auguste Perret and even the fanciful iron creations
of Hector Guimard utilized industrial elements to express feeling
in architecture which had been lost with the acceptance of the International
style. The economical superiority of concrete over steel, its universal
availability and the multiplication of its forms into any modular
arrangement gave the material an advantage for every project. In the
mid-1950s, he began to experiment with concrete shell structures as
a sculptural solution to that need for the biomorphic in our cities.
He came closest to explaining this change in his "Rich is Right"
essay for Inland Architect: "Both in the use of space and
in the form of space I discovered that behavior can be influenced
by the shape of space."

Nesting Tables for Helstein House, Chicago
1950

Marina City

In 1959, Goldberg
partnered with the Building Service Employees International Union (BSEIU), the Plumbers' Union, to develop a downtown
mixed use residential project on the north bank of the Chicago River.
Because that side of the river was socially disconnected from the
pedestrian activity in the Loop, Marina City was designed to integrate
shopping and entertainment, offices, parking and residences into a
one square block area. Residents and other users would sail into the
marina or drive into the base plaza, their cars parked in a twenty
story spiral stack, and walk to their office or take an elevator to
their apartments high above the complex.

Marina City Model
circa 1960

Marina City under
construction
circa 1961

Real
estate economics dictated that there were to be 900 units over the parking
portion. Because one structure with so many units would have been far
too dense for livability, two 60 story towers were built on the land.
Goldberg at first thought that steel shells would be appropriate for
such a tall structure but the cost proved far higher than concrete.
So Marina City became the tallest reinforced concrete structures built
to that time.

Hedrich Blessing photo
Marina City
circa 1964

Architecturally,
Goldberg achieved a more graceful and organic look to the towers with
his circular plan. Their sculpted, petal shaped cells each had a large,
semicircular balcony that cantilevered from arched supports. The overall
effect was that of a pair of gigantic reeded columns at the waterside,
with boat, bridge, street and pedestrian traffic animating the entire
complex.

At its completion
in 1964, Marina City became an immediate worldwide sensation and an
icon of Chicago. Just a few short years before, Goldberg was still
trying to be a good Miesian. Now that he had turned his back on his
former Bauhaus mentor, he achieved with one project a near legendary
status that marked him as one of the world's great expressionistic
architects.

Plan of apartments
Marina City

1960s

At the same
time he was building Marina City, Goldberg was designing Astor Tower
Hotel, a corporate residential building at the center of Chicago's
historic Gold Coast neighborhood. He ignored contextualism for this
deluxe real estate venture, raising the tower atop tall, perimeter
columns and setting it back from the line of the existing masonry
mansions. Although it was also built with a tall, central core, it
utilized a right-angle plan for its one bedroom suites. He followed
that high-end, Astor Street tower with a Chicago public housing project,
"Raymond Hilliard Center" in 1966 on the city's south side.

Vaguely similar
in profile to a Marina City without balconies, Hilliard's two 16 floor
towers for elderly residents consist of petal like cells of slip-form
concrete that entirely support the structure. The two crescent plan
towers for families also use the same self supporting cell technique.

Site plan of San Diego Theater
1969

New York's American
Broadcasting Corporation contracted Goldberg to design a 60 story
headquarters tower which he envisioned as a corrugated, concrete tube
mated to a gigantic transmission antenna. ABC instead chose to build
a conventional box-like skyscraper.

The worldwide
acclaim for Chicago's Marina City prompted developers all over the
country to attempt a "Goldberg variation" in their own inner
cities. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, he was approached to design
many mixed use tower projects in Phoenix, Detroit, Kansas City and
Boston, and commercial and entertainment resorts in Florida and the
Gulf Coast. For reasons of money, politics and simple lack of nerve,
most of the clients failed to build the projects.

Certainly the
most wildly expressionistic of his unbuilt projects was his design
for the San Diego Theater, a 1969 community theater to be built in
La Jolla, California. The three stage complex, along with its classrooms
and set construction areas was to occupy a vast serpent-like structure
of concrete sprayed steel bones, its biomorphic profile undulating
over the hills.

Goldberg Associates
surprisingly found health care clients to be the most adventurous,
and they successfully completed hospital projects in Milwaukee, Tacoma,
Boston and Phoenix. His theories of "community driven" planning
utilizing a central core for shared services branching into subsidiary
pods for individual residences worked perfectly for hospitals. The
nursing and administrative services occupied the cores and patients
were housed in surrounding pods. Alternatively, this "cluster"
technique, the nonstructural counterpart to that core with pods system,
was used most successfully in his megastructure for the Health Sciences
Center in Stony Brook, New York.

It was in his
design for Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago's Streeterville
neighborhood that he stretched the capabilities of concrete to its
upper limits. Since the late 1950s, Goldberg had cantilevered pods
from a concrete core but his design for the Prentice Women's Pavilion
let him exploit the material for his most daring form yet. Each of
the four lobes of this seven level tower would spring over 50 feet
from the elevator core. The graceful concrete cloverleaf hovered
over a five story Miesian base structure that housed a clinic whose
floor space was freed from intruding support columns.

In the mid-seventies,
Chicago approved the zoning for a vast complex of linked towers as
part of a huge marina along the branch of the river just south of
the Loop. "River City" was envisioned as the culmination
of Goldberg's earlier success with concrete core structures and cantilevered
balconies. Half a mile long and housing three times the number of
people as Marina City, the project was to have six clusters of "Triad"
towers of 72 floors, linked every eighteen floors with connecting
levels suspended between, and bracing, the three buildings.

Eventually,
the proposal eliminated all of the towers and consisted of a long,
undulating plan of two megastructures separated by "River Road,"
a glass roofed street that was to act as a marketplace. By 1985,
only one short portion of the snakelike buildings and marina was built.

Goldberg with River City Triad Model
circa 1980

Goldberg's
legacy

New York's Museum
of Modern Art included Goldberg's work in a 1968 exhibition. Chicago's
Museum of Contemporary Art and Art Institute followed suit through
the 1970s. However, France has probably been the most open to his
artistic vision, with museums and cultural centers frequently exhibiting
his work through the 70s and 80s. After presenting "150 Years
of Chicago Architecture" in 1984, the Paris Art Center installed
a more focussed exhibition of Goldberg's career the following year.
"Bertrand Goldberg: Dans la Ville" comprised models, renderings
and large photo murals of highlights of his best buildings. The exhibition
produced a French and English coffee table book that is, to this day,
the only major book on the work of Goldberg.

Because most
architects will never build a skyscraper, the few who do lean toward
safe acceptance. Clients for such projects risk losing millions over
an idea that doesn't sell, or square footage that won't lease. The
fact that Goldberg could still remain a daring artist while being
a practical engineer for such high risk structures, tells us volumes
about his salesmanship, and the foresight of his clients. Few architects
have demonstrated such individualism in the face of corporate conformity.

In spite of
his Bauhaus training at the high holy place of architectural modernism,
Bertrand Goldberg couldn't have become any other kind of artist than
the sculptor and humanist that he always was. He greatly influenced
the "futurologists," the 1960s offshoot of the traditional
Utopians in the architectural community. Several years after his death
in 1997, his family presented his archive of drawings and files to
the Department of Architecture of the Art Institute of Chicago.

The Chicago
School of Architecture was a breakthrough because it stripped the
superfluous from commercial building and expressed the beauty inherent
in structure alone. Goldberg found that the form of a building provided
its reason for being; that its very shape could supply the solutions
to the needs of its program. His visionary designs are now seen as
a major progression in the timeline of The Chicago School. Bertrand
Goldberg didn't believe that "form follows function," but
that form "allowed" function.

From his 1982
essay: "The art of architecture is in change. Architecture
needs a face that can be recognized as committed to that change; a
face to show that architecture is a social art in an industrial age,
above all concerned with the individual. Architecture is not frozen
music, as Goethe suggested, it is the body of humanism. Let us protect
it."